[internisus]

Crossposted from here for anyone who's on the fence here. There are other impressions in that thread, as well.



I finished Hotel Dusk last night. I really really really really really liked it! It has recognizable roots in Trace Memory's design, but it's a longer and more serious game and story. I can't be certain after only one playthrough, but a little experimentation showed branching non-critical conversations to yield varying results, meaning that certain parts of characters' stories are discovered optionally. This sense of non-linearity pervades the game in some regards, but it is also firmly anchored by set events and game-critical conversations that I like to think of as boss fights.

Many will likely be of the opinion that these set events keep the game feeling too rigid. For example, I found myself very frustrated at one point when I received an item without any urgent context and, wandering about the hotel, could find no one to talk to. I spent 15 minutes looking around every room and knocking on every door with nothing to do. I had to resort to gamefaqs in this instance to discover that there was a tiny adventure gamey thing that I had missed which would allow me to learn more about the item. Only after doing this was I able to continue -- or even just find someone to talk to. I also expect many of you, my peers, to be irritated by some of the physical DS gimmick puzzles, which, again, are a clear throwback to Trace Memory. Fortunately, there are a good number of straight and hard-boiled little puzzles -- my favorite is using a computer terminal near the end of the game. I would have liked more information-based interaction with practical objects like that. Besides that example, however, most of the detective action comes off as pretty light stuff. Neither the puzzles nor the deductions are difficult for either the gamer or the detective in you.

Another problem with the game's structure is that it renders the very cool notebook nearly moot. When I began the game, I immediately started in on the notebook, writing down times for promised meetings with certain characters, the hours for the restaurant, etc. However, since going to such meetings and locations is the only way to progress time in the game, and since Kyle reminds himself mentally at such times anyway, there's really no point to using the notebook in this way. The only other consistent use I had for it was keeping track of what happened 6 months, 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 7 years, and 10 years ago, and that was purely for the fun of keeping the story straight as it slowly unraveled. Basically, there was no practical need to keep track of anything at all with the notebook, and that disappointed me a lot.

Despite these shortcomings, I feel pretty comfortable saying that this is the most enjoyable game I've played for the past two years. Where to begin? Well, we all knew in advance about the art style, but let me tell you, it is used to exceptional effect in the expressive animation of the characters. Guys like Kyle and Dunning are made intensely memorable by a perfect match of dialogue style and animation; the ways they cock their heads and squint their eyes and gesture with their hands vividly accompany their respective Raymond Chandler and relaxed country text-speech. Naturally, all of the character design is spot-on, and, of course, the writing is exceptional, to the point where even reading the thorough summaries for chapters you've completed is a joy.

It might -- and will, I imagine -- be said by some that the plot is hackneyed, since everything boils down to one very big set of coincidences, but I'm not the sort to mind that. Actually, I rather like that kind of story, so long as there is an indication of forces that have planned for such coincidences to come together, and in this case I feel that it works just fine. The story is much longer and more complex than Trace Memory, which is to be expected, considering that Hotel Dusk is a 15-20 hour game and that it involves a much, much higher dialogue-to-exploration ratio than its predecessor. Let me tell you, that complexity gave me a number of really nice high sensations during intense interrogations at the ends of some of the earlier chapters in which I began to see how the pieces might fit together and how the seeds for future sub-stories might relate.

The late '70s noir setting and the music round out the game's flavor beautifully. You can examine pretty much every object in the hotel, and some of Kyle's comments are so dry that I laughed out loud from time to time. For instance, upon looking at yet another wooden table in one room, he said, "It's a bookcase. Wait, no, that's a table. My mistake." The game is by turns coy and sinister, but, I feel compelled to repeat, it is a joy throughout. I was so delighted that I immediately started to play the first chapter over again after completing the game, just to see some faces again.

It seems to me that Hotel Dusk is a testament to the visual novel format's ability to render an involving story in a very different fashion than a book. As I said, the game is fundamentally linear and controlled, but it doesn't always feel that way, and in the case of conversations, there are definitely branching possibilities and optional chunks of development that one might miss. But more than that, the simple fact of your interaction and the subtly earnest presentation grant this story a strength it likely would not find in print form. That is not to say that the story would not work as a book -- it is good enough that, if written properly, I can certainly see it that way. However, as a visual novel / adventure, it is a far more endearing and charming experience. I've played precious few visual novels, and all, I believe, have been here, on the DS. I wish even more now for more of them.

[internisus]

yes, it's sadly true, but it's still an enjoyable story, don't you think?

[internisus]

Yes, there certainly is. It's clear that Cing needs a good game designer on top of their writers, artists, and programmers, but you have to wonder just what can be done with a rigidly structured linear narrative.

Kevin, the phrase "in a row" is what makes the solution logical. You just have to think in three dimensions.

[internisus]

If you tilted your head sideways so that the Z-axis became the new X-axis then that would be a row. A row just means a straight line. It doesn't have to be two-dimensional. Realizing this is the clever bit of the solution.